Posted
by
samzenpus
on Sunday November 07, 2010 @07:57PM
from the think-of-the-children dept.

mvdwege writes "The popular wiki TV Tropes, a site dedicated to the discussion of various tropes, clichés and other common devices in fiction has suddenly decided to put various of its pages behind a 'possibly family-unsafe' content warning, apparently due to pressure by Google withdrawing its ads. What puzzles me most is the content that is put behind this warning. TV Tropes features no explicit sexual content, and no explicit violence. It does of course discuss these things, as is its remit, but without actual explicit depictions. In fact, something as relatively innocuous as children being raised by two females, whatever the reason are put behind the content warning, even if the page itself doesn't take a stand on the issue, merely satisfying itself by describing the occurence of this in fiction."

Honestly, is there any other kind of idiot? Be careful how much you insult them; are you so sure you aren't one? Like Socrates said, "be more aware of the man who thinks he is wise than the man who thinks he is a fool." OK he didn't say that exactly, but close.

Like Socrates said, "be more aware of the man who thinks he is wise than the man who thinks he is a fool." OK he didn't say that exactly, but close.

The exact quote was "I pity the fool who trusts other fools who don't know they be fools". It's from his tell-all scroll "Socrates It To Me! - The Life And Times Of A Gonzo Philosopher" published in 402 BC by Spartan Press. It was rated 4 Zeus lightning bolts out of 5 by the most popular news runners of the day.

Google does not run ads on NSFW pages. It violates their TOS. People were editing in NSFW content on some pages, and one of the auditors at Google caught it. Now TVTropes has to make sure that any pages that may have NSFW content do not run Google ads.

This however is NOT a brave NEW world, is the same old world the US has had for a very long time. He that pays the piper, chooses the tune.

Advertising is NOT free money. The advertiser advertises in your media because he thinks that has the appropriate audience. That sound harmless BUT the eternal search for more money means that this isn't static. The advertiser will seek to influence the media he is advertising in to increase the effect of his advertising.

And yet people will continue to defend this company. Google has been guilty of way more stupid bullshit in the last few years than Microsoft, which has been a harmless, slow-moving relic since the antitrust trial a decade ago. I'd love to see how people would react if Steve Ballmer said that only criminals care about privacy.

While Censorship and restraint are very different issues. One I wish Wikipedia would learn when clicking on various biology articles. Oh I wonder what that illness is (MY EYES!!). I do find it odd that a site like TV tropes which has no offensive images (that I know of) could run in to trouble on review based off a few counter culture tropes.

Hell even the articles that talk about adult issues are all extremely tame when you think about it compared to the stuff you find on forums. I wouldn't be surprised if the reviewer stumbled on to a mischievous edit or they just got red flag in general for having completely anom edits.

If you've ever read anything on tvtropes, you'll realize that that's the standard way of starting an anecdote or personal example, such as "in this troper's experience", "this toper saw/believes/felt" and "this troper read in a fanfic somewhere...".

The technical term for this kind of thing is "Chilling Effect". It's actually a term of art.

It's one reason why there's such a danger in any single company getting as big, and as ubiquitous as Google has become. And unfortunately, there is no mechanism of the "free market" which deals with this. It's one reason (among many) that the free market will always end up being "un-free". A further problem is that there will seldom be a point at which you can say, "There! Now it has become a danger."

There probably was a point somewhere between Google being a search engine and Google being an advertising agency and Google being an ISP, and Google having trucks with cameras and wi-fi sniffers driving down every street in the world, where it crossed the line.

Since the Justice Department has been asleep at the wheel for the past several decades, Google will not be broken up as it should be. It will become both "too big to fail" and "big enough to fuck everything up".

I think breaking up the financial institutions would be a higher priority than breaking up Google, but that's just my opinion. Google is in no way too big to fail, technology companies always seem to have a more than ample supply of other companies willing to take the market share. People are just paranoid because they fear that Google "knows" too much, which may be justified but may also be just plain old paranoia.

"Too big to fail" really referred to financial institutions whose failure would not just affect the company (which is bad enough, but the risk of doing business), but all of their investors, bank customers, clients, etc. (as appropriate) and thus adversely affect the whole U.S. economy far beyond what another business of the same size would affect.

It was bad enough when Enron bellied up and took down the pensions, etc, of employees or retirees, but if a bank failed and took _your_ or _my_ life savings/pensi

I don't use any Google things anymore. I prefer DuckDuckGo for searching and I prefer OpenStreetMap for maps. They were the only two Google things that I ever used. That doesn't mean that Google is unaware of what I'm doing. If I visit any site with Google ads or analytics, they track me. If I send an email or write an IM to anyone using GMail, Google scans it (not always obvious, because a lot of people point their own domains at Google's SMTP / XMPP servers these days). They have driven their van pa

Yup, you can get away from a lot of it by blocking Google's servers, using end-to-end encryption for all mail and IMs and filing take-down notices against Google for pictures of your house. Or you can go and live in the opt out village [theonion.com]. My point is that you need to do a lot more than 'just not use their services,' as the grandparent suggested.

I don't regard Google as especially evil, but they have accumulated so much power that it's very easy for them to misuse it even without malicious intent.

I thought that was the SEC. Or was it the FTC? It certainly isn't the Justice Dpt.

Yes, Thinboy00, it certainly IS the Justice Department that brings anti-trust suits against monopolies.

They are the legal enforcement arm of the executive branch. Eric Holder is currently the Attorney General. I bet if you use Google, you can find all sorts of information about previous anti-trust cases the Justice Department has brought.

Then, you can use your gmail account to send email to yourself with the information so y

This is precisely why the DoJ is supposed to screen mergers and say no when it would result in insufficient competition. Had the DoJ said no to Google buying Doubleclick, it's much less likely that this would've happened as Google wouldn't be controlling most of the entire market.

It's a de facto near-monopoly all over again, just like Microsoft with IE and Office. I don't think it's necessarily the result of Google being Evil, but when a site's choice of sponsorship is Google or Ohfuckwhatdowedonow, there's a serious problem with the online advertising market.

It's not for free -- they have to include Google content and follow rules about how it displays, and now the terms seem to be changing out from under them to also have to hide their own content behind an annoying, user-unfriendly click-through.

Basically the problem is that Google is wielding an advertising monopoly to dictate the business terms of its suppliers (supplying eyeballs and data). That tends to be controversial -- sure, we're mostly okay if they refuse to do business with explicitly pro-slavery organizations, but as you back off into grey areas more and more people's hackles start to rise. This particular case smells like a light form of censorship, which is particularly unpopular on slashdot.

I don't think this incident is a huge deal, though I do find it frustrating that TV Tropes will be a little harder to use the next time I decide to lose myself in its pages for a while. And to be clear, I don't think Sergei Brin is sitting atop a dark tower laughing maniacally and screaming "by the power of this monopoly SOON ALL WILL BE UNDER MY CONTROL". It's merely that relatively innocent actions, when backed up by an effective monopoly, have profound effects.

That suggests a question -- does Google have an advertising monopoly? It's a tough question. French courts have ruled that they are (I'd paste a link but Chrome has had problems pasting into slashdot these days -- use Google:) to find a court ruling from France on July 2). But they do have one competitor, though it's about a quarter the size of Google: Microsoft. That doesn't sit well with a large portion of slashdotters either so there's really no remaining alternative.

Umm. A 'market', of any type, depends on a high degree of transparency and the ability to exchange one provider of a good or service for another; It may not be *fair* that a sufficient level of success creates the very domination of a market that distorts these, but I am only aware of Rand acolytes willing to staunchly deny this as a matter of course - even most libertarians I know will grant that.

When a single entity dominates the market, that transparency and capacity to contract as equals disappears - of *course* success is a valid reason to regulate. In this case, yes, Google's domination of the market allows them to deliver ad rates well above that of any competitor and still gain a profit, and that in turn means that Google's definition of family friendly can have a chilling effect regardless of whether that definition is reflective of society.

Is such regulation needed here? I don't know - but although TV Tropes is hardly a paragon of virtue, looking at it comparatively to the Internet at large, even dismissing the explicitly erotic, they are hardly anyone's definition of obscene, and yet a complaint to Google could result in a unilateral suspension of services on which they had come to depend, without warning or an attempt to correct the issue from both sides.

And let us be clear here - this was an exchange of goods and services - Google provided the ads, TV Tropes provided the space - and yet the suspension *was* initiated unilaterally and without warning or even complaint to the offending partner. This does not describe a 'typical' relationship of equals under contact law.

I absolutely hate people who look at a successful product, grow to depend on it, and think its success should be a valid reason to impose regulations, or that it should enter public ownership.

When your civilization depends on a technology, are you saying you trust a private, for profit corporation more than you trust a democratically controlled government? To ask the question in another way, since Google can now afford to arm themselves with fighter jets and tanks and a few hundred thousand secret police to help them achieve better profits, should they be allowed to?

There's a reason utilities are so heavily regulated. When a private company has the ability to screw their customers over, they will. That's their soul reason for existence: screwing customers to their benefit. Overcharging is having a "profit margin." Bullshit fees are "profit centers." This is all well and good when you're talking apples and cars and computers, but becomes very problematic when you're talking about media control and health care and defense.

To give you an idea about some unintended consequences concerning market share, fast food companies are unsurprisingly the nations number one consumer of hamburger patties. Since our factory farms are so putrid, people started dying from e.coli from eating those hamburgers. So what was the industry solution? Inject those hamburgers with ammonia (yes, the kind in Windex) to kill the bacteria instead of cleaning up the factory farms. You may think that doesn't matter to you because you don't eat fast food, but now that method is so popular that pretty much any hamburger patty you buy will be tainted with ammonia. And thanks to deregulation, they don't have to list that as an ingredient, since it's a "processing agent."

There are thousands of examples like this, and it's the rule, not the exception. Even the unintended consequences of monopolies are bad enough to understand why we need to return corporations to what they are: temporary organizational units that serve at the pleasure of the people, which should be dismantled when they stop performing their function. If there was simply an arbitrary limit of 15% on the market share of internet advertising, we would have a standardized way of allowing competition as we have for broadband resellers, and the market would be more competitive and better for it.

You've got to admit that the idea of a google tank rolling through the streets of Baghdad taking pictures and sniffing wifi is as funny as it is disconcerting...especially if it has the logo in big friendly letters plastered all over it;-)

As for fighter jets...not really Google's style. I reckon they'd go for unmanned attack drones. Which would kill everything in sight but would follow the instructions in robots.txt to the letter.

Protect in this sense of course means "indoctrinate." I don't see the problem with sexual/violent content at all. There's nothing to protect them from. A person who is normal to begin with doesn't magically become a murderer/rapist when they view content.

You're either very, very sheltered from the Internet, or you've never actually had any contact with kids...

There's a lot of weird stuff on the internet. No, I mean, seriously wacko stuff. In the public limelight, there's already goatse, and that 2girls and a cup thingy. Even movies like The Human Centipede are pretty wacked. Or stuff like Saw. Nothing I've mentioned here is particularly hard to find, and in fact is commonly mentioned on forums like Slashdot (would you regard Slashdot as not family frie

I don't think anyone would drop dead or become insane after seeing goatse or 2girls1cup. The worst that would happen is vomiting.

Anyway, you can monitor your kids, you can also install filters and have a whitelist/blacklist so your kids don't see what you think is bad for them. I don't care about that.

However, you cannot make the whole internet "safe" for your kids so you can stop worrying about installing filters. There is a simple reason for that - there are people other than your kids using the internet. Another reason is that if we allowed every parent to censor the whole internet, there would be nothing left, since hardcore religious people would object to evolution and atheist sites, hardcore atheists would object to religious sites, a lot of people would object to porn and others to violence and so on.

Streets are also unsafe for your kids - a drunk or careless driver can run them over, they can be mugged etc. However, you probably would not like if there was a law that required everyone (except parents) to keep at least 200m distance from a kid or even better - go inside until the kid passes.

Oh and also - the warnings don't work. I don't know about you, but I had no trouble clicking "I'm 18" when I was younger than 18, so I don't see why this warning would protect your kids, unless you monitor then and/or have filters which makes the warning pointless.

Oh and TV Tropes included NSFW warning on links to other sites that were... well... NSFW. I have not seen any NSFW content on the site itself (not that the fact that you have been browsing TV tropes instead of working is SFW).

It's not exactly THE SKY IS FALLING scenario, but it does mean that the idea of putting a "Do you want to continue" here to prevent accidental clickage isn't a bad idea.

I don't know if you remember being a kid, but most kids seeing a "This content is not for kids, click here if you're definitely not a kid" link will click it purely out of curiosity. It's the same reason we have to have child proof containers for household chemicals or medication. Do you honestly think this page is any kind of barrier to a kid seeing the content, and if not then what purpose does it serve?

Oh, don't worry, I wasn't a kid that long ago. I know a lot of the time it's like holding a red flag to a bull...haha.

But look, at the end of the day, it's teaching kids a bit of responsibility.

So say, there was something like goatse or the 2girls1cup behind a "click warning". And it said, do you really want to proceed? Well, sure the kid clicks, and he says "oh s*it...that is sick...". He or she has nobody but themselves to blame now. And they're going to feel a bit stupid for clicking through. It's l

What is family friendly for you is family unfriendly for me.I like the idea of children being educated about life before they experience it. Who are they to say what is family friendly? Who is anyone? Can i specify that I'd rather they hid violence from children than sex?

My dad occasionally brought us presents after my parents separated. Once he brought my sister a book called The Daddy machine. [amazon.com]

After he left my mom opened the book out of curiosity and discovered that the kids in the story had 2 mothers. She read the back cover which indicated that the publisher catered to kids with gay parents. My mom had thought that my dad was trying to subtly say that she was a lesbian and ripped him a new ass over the phone while my sisters and I laughed our asses off at the whole "two mommies" thing, which is funny when you're a kid.

It was an honest mistake, because he picked it up from a big store chain in haste and couldn't tell just from a glance of the cover.

Just wanted to point out that only under a very specific definition of family are children implied. Otherwise under no way are children implied when someone says "family" I would consider a married couple to be a family as would many other people.

Are you unfamiliar with the concept of adoption? Of step-children? Do you think that infertile people should be unable to marry?

Sorry, but where in your constitution does it say that everyone has a right to marriage

That would be the equal protection clause of Amendment XIV. When Alice and Bob are allowed to get married, but Alice and Bobbi are not, merely because of the presence or absence of a Y chromosome, that is not equal protection under the law.

and that the government has a right to redefine marriage?

Civil marriage is a government creation. Law doesn't "redefine" it any more than it "redefines" patents or copyrights; without government action, civil marriage does not exist.

Marriage was not instituted by the government because it preceded any form of government.

Nonsense. There is no civil marriage without a government; and anyway, when was this mythical time when humans had no form of government? Hominid dominance hierarchies have always been with us.

Governments passed laws to recognize and regulate marriage based on societies values which is not the same thing as creating marriage.

No. Civil marriage is a legal institution, a contractual obligation. The social aspect of marriage is between the couple (or triad or whatever) and their friends; the religious aspect is between them and their priests, ministers, or shamans. But the legal aspect is entirely a creation of the state.

It's entirely possible for these to be separate; there are many people who are legally married whose marriage is not recognized by the Catholic church, for example. If you don't want to invite Alice and Bobbi to the cotillion, or want to disinclude them in your prayers to the Flying Spaghetti Monster, that's your own business; if you want to deny them equal protection under the law, then you're guilty of a high crime against humanity.

Marriage requires a license and so it is not a right.

So what? Do you think, "Driving requires a license so it is not a right; so it's ok for the government to forbid (blacks/Christians/Democrats/whatever) from driving"? Equal treatment under the law is a right.

Make a civil union a state issue, covering things like joint ownership of property, joint tax, inheritance, and so on. Make marriage a religious issue, completely distinct from civil union and carrying no legal weight. Sell it to the left as a way of getting religion out of government and sell it to the right as a way of getting government out of religion.

Take a stance? They could easily take a stand - tell Google to fuck off with its ad dollars.

When are y'all going to get this isn't censorship, it's marketing? Advertisers don't want to piss off customers, many of whom may well be backward hicks. Money doesn't care if it comes from a hick or an educated genius, it's still money. Google cannot keep its advertisers if they allow their ad software to be plastering ads for Duncan Hines and Soft Soap all over porn sites, or even sites some of those hicks who buy soft soap and duncan hines might consider questionable in their editorial content.

This is completely protected speech - and they have made their decision: money is more important than "educating" (more likely alienating) a bunch of hicks who can't stand the notion of two people having sex. Whoopee.

Yes, but Google in doing so has abused it's market position for it's own benefit. Theoretically the DoJ ought to be investigating the abuse of power. But then again, the DoJ ought to have used the Clayton Antitrust Act to prevent them from gaining so much control of the online advertising space in the first place.

This is completely protected speech - and they have made their decision: money is more important than "educating" (more likely alienating) a bunch of hicks who can't stand the notion of two people having sex. Whoopee.

I'm not sure you or the GP understands how protected speech works.

If Google decided to drop advertising on all websites that discuss whether or not Glenn Beck raped and murdered a girl in 1990, claiming "parody" is going to get you no where.

A private company is well within its rights to set standards and not do business with another private company because of protected speech that falls outside those standards.

It is The worst kind of censorship. The one a quasi monopolist can do, and you CAN'T do anything to fight it, except taking a stand and losing revenue.

Being born in the western europe, I never feared governement censorship. But private censorship done by all media, advertising, now that is the one which is difficult to fight, as the *conduit* which are supposed to be used to spread info, are stopping that info to go out. First amendement , lost schmamendement. I would wagger a bet that it is the same in the US: most censorship , is not done by the governement, but by private media. It is all nice that the govenrement can't stop your free speech, when all you can do is take a soapbox and go in the street yell your opinion, because NONE of the mass media will let you carry it. But with some form of speech, this is the situation where we are headed to.

Please, someone create a TV show based on the Song of Songs of the Bible to fuck with those people.

What to do, what to do. It's the Bible and yet, it's porn!

They would mess it up, badly. Given that the English puritans intentionally mistranslated the reference to cunnilingus in 7:2, and the American puritans mistranslated it again in the NIV, you shouldn't get your hopes up. They might just make some sort of wishy-washy show saying it is an analogy for the love of God for Israel...

(Well maybe if the Germans did it... Luther at least dared to get that translation right.)

Your navel is a rounded goblet that never lacks blended wine. Your waist is a mound of wheat encircled by lilies. (Song of Songs 7:2, NIV)

The point in question is the meaning of the word "sharerech" (transliterated, it seems./ doesn't do Hebrew script). Most (all?) English translations translate this as "navel" as a derivative of the Hebrew word for umbilical cord. Good evidence for this translation is the use of the word in Ezekiel 16:4 where the meaning is clear from context.

Some claim that the word drives from the Arabic word for secret and thus is a woman's private parts, but the context is describing the looks of a woman dancing (see

Please, someone create a TV show based on the Song of Songs of the Bible to fuck with those people.

What to do, what to do. It's the Bible and yet, it's porn!

Why do you assume that all Christians would be offended? I am a member of one of the most "conservative" Southern Baptist mega churches around, and neither my wife nor I have ever attended a Sunday School or sermon which said that Song of Songs wasn't about sex and wasn't an awesome book. If all you know about Christianity are the stereotypes on TV, I feels sorry for your ignorance. For most Protestant denominations, within marriage sex is considered an extremely wonderful and important part of a couple's relationship.

> Out of curiousity, does it also come up that Solomon had a pile of wives and that means he had a different definition of marriage than our current/mainstream one?

Only 300 of them were wives, the other 700 were concubines. No, I did not have to look those numbers up. I'm surprised you didn't instead refer to the part when King David was old and infirm, so they found a pretty young lady to keep him warm at night. Or maybe the story about how crazy Lot's daughters were... But they're seen as a condemn

It wouldn't be porn to people who think that the concept of lust has no place in the Bible, and do complex mental acrobatics to convince themselves that Solomon was writing about anything but.

"7:1 How beautiful are thy feet with shoes, O prince's daughter! the joints of thy thighs are like jewels, the work of the hands of a cunning workman.
7:2 Thy navel is like a round goblet, which wanteth not liquor: thy belly is like an heap of wheat set about with lilies.
7:3 Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins."

It wouldn't be porn to people who think that the concept of lust has no place in the Bible,

Without taking a position one way or the other in that question, what is illustrated in Song of Songs is erotic love, not lust. These have many superficial characteristics in common, and have considerable connection to each other, but they differ in one essential respect: lust is easy to satisfy; erotic love is impossible to satisfy. As an illustration of this distinction, you might be very interested in having intercourse with some porn star without having any interest in spending every moment of the rest

Because it's the "Christians" that are the sole arbiters of what is and is not family friendly, duh. But seriously, there's a lot of small minded bigots out there that like to use things like this to erase as many traces of things they might have to think about as possible.

The real reason behind Google pulling their advertising is pressure from governments and schools to increase worker/student productivity, and if you think I'm kidding, you've never been to TvTropes. As far as a free-time black hole, it's orders of magnitude worse than Facebook.

As far as a free-time black hole, it's orders of magnitude worse than Facebook.

But once you've completed your initial binge on TV Tropes, it isn't any more of a time waster than Wikipedia. You can wiki walk [tvtropes.org] on any large wiki, but they become shorter as you become familiar with the subject matter.

...plotlines if there is some damn website giving out all the magic tricks to the little ones. Battlestar Galactica: WOW! The crew is named Adem and Eeve and then named the primitive planet Urth. V: Wow! The Aliens want our water. Star Trek: Wow! An creature made entirely of some unknown energy. Glee: Wow! Will the gang of misfits prevail?!

"As a mature adult, I object to having every aspect of my media dumbed down to avoid inflicting the truth on children."

As someone who isn't completely detached from reality, I object to censoring (yes, I know that this isn't necessarily censorship) anything in the name of children. Even children know what is fiction and what is not, and even if they don't, they won't magically become a murder/rapist because of content that they viewed.

Since they have years worth of AdSense data, surely they know who their primary advertisers are.

They should approach those advertisers and deal direct, which would allow the site to operate more freely. As a bonus, cutting out the middleman (Google), would likely result in more revenue than before.

Selling ads is presumably not their forte, so the site would likely need to find someone versed in on-line sales and price negotiations - could be well worth the effort in the long-run verses passively relying on Google.

They should approach those advertisers and deal direct, which would allow the site to operate more freely. As a bonus, cutting out the middleman (Google), would likely result in more revenue than before.

There's a reason why people use middlemen. Sure, they take a cut of the revenue - but they also do much of the heavy lifting. I seriously doubt that many websites can make any money off of advertising if they have to pay for all the legwork that 'approaching those advertisers and dealing directly' would require. (Assuming the advertisers are willing to spend the time/money/effort it takes to deal with individual websites - there's a reason why they are using middlemen too.)

Google seems to have recently started enforcing AsSense TOS in ways that they were never enforced them before. It's their business, and they have the right to set whatever TOS they want. I also have the right to think they're a bunch of assholes.

Do the ostensibly "pro-family" conservatives who seem to idolize the time before the industrial revolution realize that for most of human history children were exposed to their parents having sex with eachother(or other people for that matter) from a very young age. What do they think happened in those 1 room houses? The parents would kick all the kids out in the middle of winter so they could have time to bang out a quickie? I don't know where these people are getting information on children and sexuality, but it aint from the right place(hell, some of these people are Catholic so they seem to think it's ok for priests to diddle little kids, just as long as they don't talk about what they are doing.)

TV Tropes has the first amendment right to say whatever they like. Google has an equal right not to support them. This is exactly how censorship should work. No government involvement, no heavy hand laws or hypocritical politicians to be seen. TV Tropes could still publish whatever they'd like, but TV Tropes has decided that profit is more important than keeping the warning labels off their content. This should be applauded as a shining example of the 1st amendment at it's best, not as if Google is trying to squash their speech. Everyone has the right to speech, but if they want a megaphone, someone has to pay for it.

A giant corporation with a large amount of influence dropping support for people that dare say something against their views? I mean, yes, if censorship exists at all, I'd rather have this happen than the government doing it, but that doesn't mean that censorship isn't completely pointless and an obscenity in and of itself.

I very much doubt this has anything to do with Googles views. It has to do with Googles customers having a reasonable expectation that their ads not show up supporting something they might think is questionable. And in this case, the exact same content is still there, it just has a quick warning blurb in front of it that in now way hinders it's affect. Google has every right to do this. This is how it's supposed to work. You just agree with the outcome. You have every right to boycott Googles goods and serv

I mean, yes, if censorship exists at all, I'd rather have this happen than the government doing it,

Oh, no. I have to disagree. As Chomsky says, the government is potentially democratic, corporations are pure tyrannies. If I have a problem with the FCC censoring someone, at least I can pressure my representatives to change the policy. With Google, I have no sway at all. I don't even know who I would complain to.

Economic power is political power. When we limit the power of government, private power fills in that void unless we limit that too. We haven't gotten that far yet, but we need to if we are ever going to be free people again.

U.S. of A., the United States of Advertising. Freedom of expression is guaranteed... If you've got the money!

Everyone has the right to speech, but if they want a megaphone, someone has to pay for it.

The megaphone part is exactly what is wrong with free speech in America right now. Go ahead and exercise your first amendment right in the woods (aka a “Free speech zone”), but good luck if you want to exercise that same right on any kind of mass media. Want to say anything on a national level that might upset a corporation? Not possible unless you’ve got the resource to outspend

TV Tropes has the first amendment right to say whatever they like. Google has an equal right not to support them. This is exactly how censorship should work.

Saying that Google should have the legal right to do this (or to refrain from doing this) is not the same thing as saying that Google should do it.

It is possible to believe both that the law should not prevent a particular course of action while at the same time believing that the actor that is legally free to take that course of action should not choo

Until Google actually makes a statement on this, I'm just writing it off as a single Google employee misrepresenting company opinion and a (relatively) small website complaining to a favorable audience instead of doing the appropriate thing and appealing to someone else at Google.

I was in the TVTropes IRC channel when all this was going on, and what came out was: the contract for the ads that the tvtropes people signed with Google explicitly stated that no family-unsafe content was allowed. The wiki flew under the radar for a good while, probably because it has nothing explicit and so nobody thought of checking too hard, but ultimately someone did. Now, while the wiki has no porn or anything like it, it's undeniable that some of the arguments might be seen as not suitable for young children. Whether talk about lesbian erotica or massive amounts of profanity [tvtropes.org] harm children or not can be discussed at length, but the matter remains that the contract conditions were clear.
I hate censorship as much as the next slashdotter and I hate self-righteous moralization even more, but in this particular case I find all this anti-googlism to be way out of proportion. Especially considering that TVTropes didn't really self-censore anything, they just put the relevant articles behind an "are you really sure" clickthrough barrier; all the content is still there.